


Harmodius at the Jardin des Plantes

by tritonvert



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Amis are Amies, Canon Era, Gen, well i mean eventually they will be Amies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:11:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonvert/pseuds/tritonvert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“First, to write canon-era fic where the Amis are women; second, to write it for the brilliant artist noyades; that is sublime.  What could be greater?”</p>
<p>  <em>“To have more than a day to write it in.”</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Harmodius at the Jardin des Plantes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noyades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noyades/gifts).



> This is for tumblr's wonderful artist noyades, who requested the Amis as women, with Enjolras and Joly interacting. Which is a prompt that I absolutely love--and which I caught as a last-minute pinch-hit request. This piece stands alone, I hope, but I also hope to revisit these proto-Amies. Joly is Very Young and half of them haven't even shown up yet! I hope that the Amies here are at least a satisfactory sketch of what they might be.

**1826**

 

“Haven’t you got a handkerchief?”  Joly jumped, sniffled again reflexively, and apologized.  Yes, yes, she had--here it was.  She applied it remorsefully and shot an anxious look at the girl sitting behind her, the one who had whispered.   “I’m sorry,” she whispered again.  “It's just that flowers make me sneeze.” Like the lilacs heaped all around the room. And the peonies. And the violets. And the very large lily pinned to her sketching paper. Perhaps attending a public lecture on floral illustration wasn’t her wisest idea.  But she huddled over her paper with her handkerchief ready for action and tried to sniffle more quietly.  They were packed into the lecture hall, mostly women, elbow jostling elbow.

When the lecture let out, Joly lifted her chin and made a point of catching up to the tall blonde girl.  (Somewhere along the way Lesgle had gotten misplaced, or had misplaced her, but that was something they could sort out later.) She was standing with a young gentleman--very young--who was rather shorter than her, but who made up for it with a truly fine hat.  “I really am sorry,” Joly started, and broke off when the young man began to laugh.  “No, I am, I--”  She felt her cheeks heating up; she hoped it didn’t show.  “I was interrupting your--”  Quite abruptly the girl she was talking to flushed red as well, and put a restraining hand on the young man’s arm.  He bit his lip.

“I’m the one who should apologize.  I meant that I would offer you a handkerchief, but it came out--”

“My _sweet sister_ doesn’t know how terrible she can seem without meaning it.”  And--oh. Well.  He wasn’t a young man but a young woman in trousers, which answered some questions but raised many more.

“ _There_ you are.  How did we lose one another this time?”  Lesgle’s arrival was all that was needed for Joly to cover her face and begin laughing as well.  That set off the other laughter-inclined member of the group, leaving Lesgle and the tall blonde girl to stare at one another with their eyebrows up.  Which did nothing to restore order, until the blonde girl took command.

“My name is Enjolras, and this Courfeyrac, who is _not_ my brother.  I’m sorry for the misunderstanding before.  Do flowers really make you sneeze?”

“They do--”  Joly composed herself and finished the introductions.  “And I apologize again for the sniffling.  Are you very interested in drawing flowers?”

“Not really.  Are you?”

That was frank.  Joly admired it.  “Not really either.  But I come to all the lectures I can, here.  Sometimes I even surprise myself by learning something. --I do enjoy the Jardin des Plantes, flowers and all.”

“Yes--it’s an outing.”  That was Mlle. Courfeyrac.  “It’s an outing, and you meet some excellent people.  Like Mme. Bahorel, I met her at one of these.  Do you know her?  She’s a scandal.  I worship her.  Nobody believes she’s really a widow, but she still has three thousand a year.   She gave me the idea for all this--the boots, and the _et cetera_ , don’t you know.  It turns out you can go anywhere this way. Take your 'sister' for a walk. You can't believe how gallant I become as soon as I have a good pair of boots.”

Lesgle, who was understood by the senior M. Joly to act as a moderating and chaperoning influence on his daughter, nodded at once.  “It’s brilliant.”

-

 

The four of them walked together in the gardens for an hour or more after that, Joly ignoring her waiting carriage.  They deepened their introductions: Joly, whose father had imported her from Avignon to find a match that would suit his Martinique money; Lesgle, her school friend, now parentless as well as penniless, who had been imported from Meaux to provide respectable companionship; Enjolras, whose parents divided their time between Paris and the Haute-Loire; Courfeyrac, properly de Courfeyrac, a family friend who had been to a girls' school in Paris and upon graduation had "run away from home right straight back here" to live with her brothers.  “And I promise you they don’t introduce themselves by who they live with.  I wish I were a widow!  That’s freedom for you, if you’re a woman.”

“ _Freedom_ is freedom.”  It was Enjolras. The rest of them looked down for a moment; then Courfeyrac took off her hat and held it over her heart.  The gesture contained no trace of parody.

It was Lesgle who broke the silence.  “We were going to attend the evening lecture next week.  Will we see you there?”

 

\---

  
  


The subject was magnetism; the speaker, a student of Deleuze, who read aloud some works by the former and then demonstrated a series of brief experiments. Joly left the lecture hall leaning on Lesgle’s arm, and her mind was humming.  The words magnetism and mesmerism had come into her home now and then, spoken with a frown, called unwholesome quackery.  But...that there was some force in the world, something that connected the tangible, the physical, the flesh, with the mind and the emotions, whose workings were surely as real...one had only to see a friend, to smile, to see that same smile light her face, to recognize that a force had moved between you and to feel its effects.  Laughter caught across a room the same way.  And when you saw pain or fear cramp another person’s body and felt your own chest tighten... She pressed Lesgle’s arm and her friend twined their fingers together.  

They pulled one another ahead to join the others.  Enjolras and Courfeyrac walked arm in arm as well, joined by a third friend.  Combeferre was her name: she had smiled warmly enough at Joly’s enthusiastic greeting, but had looked tired, very tired, as they had met together in front of the lecture hall.  Now she seemed to have tapped into some reserve of energy.  “My brother has heard Deleuze speak and had the chance to question him closely about one of his experiments.  Deleuze convinced him quite thoroughly of the place of animal magnetism in medical studies.  I would have liked to hear him in person, myself, but I suppose hearing his words through the proxy of a student will do… I will push my mother to include some mention of magnetism in our lessons for the older girls…”

“Oh, do you teach?”  Lesgle had used her long legs and good cheer to insert herself bodily into the conversation.  “I thought about trying for a place somewhere, teaching, but I loved school so little myself that I thought the condition might prove contagious.”  

Mlle. Combeferre laughed tiredly.  “My mother and I run a small school for girls. Judge our success by our star pupil Courfeyrac--she's not my fault, though, we're contemporaries.  --This is my half-day. I wish they held all their free lectures in the evening.  There are a few people I see here every time, who must be coming from their work also.”

“What a shame that they should find nothing more useful than mesmerism. --No, no!”  Enjolras held up her hands in front of her, faced with the paired indignant interjections of Combeferre and Joly.  “No, no, I don’t disparage your science.  I did not follow it all but I see that you two did.  But where are the lectures on natural right, sovereignty of the people, that would teach us all the power that we could have if we only claimed it?  When do you hear the names of our heroes, of Robespierre and--”

Courfeyrac had placed her hat on top of Enjolras’ head and tapped it firmly down.  The distraction served its purpose and Courfeyrac laughed, but her face was grave in the shadows.  Joly looked to Combeferre and saw the same.  “They don’t give public lectures on liberty,” said Combeferre, “for the same reason that we don’t proclaim the Republic in the middle of the Jardin des Plantes, with who-knows-how-many police informers listening.”

“Where can we proclaim it, then?”  Enjolras had removed the hat and pushed it firmly back to Courfeyrac.  But she spoke more quietly.  “You and your friend the widow can put on your famous boots and your trousers and take a stroll through the park, but can you raise your voices among a club of political men?”

“Well, we can’t safely raise them in the streets, either, not like that.”  Courfeyrac accepted the hat and placed it over her glossy short curls with a flourish.  “What I’ve said is that you should keep a salon.”

“I have no patience for salons.  Give me a sword and a revolution instead.  Give me a Bastille to tear down.  Why not?  Women were there too.”

They had stopped walking in the middle of this conversation and drawn to the side of the path, the five young women close together under the trees, arm in arm or shoulder to shoulder.  Joly shivered: now in the June evening, the voice of insurrection raised the hair on the back of her neck.  Enjolras saw her tremble and smiled suddenly, pulling her close and placing a kiss on her cheek.  “Don’t be afraid of us, friend.  We aren’t the furies of the guillotine yet.”

“It won’t come to that.”  Combeferre, stern-faced.  And Enjolras again: “Not if we keep our hopes this ephemeral.  Girls in summer frocks, out for a stroll, dawdling on their way back to footmen and safe carriages!”

Lesgle cleared her throat.  The sound cut into what seemed like the start of a debate.  “I agree.  A salon is an awful thing, a constraint without substance.  Take away the couches and the mirrors on the wall and you have no salon.  Why not say ‘club’ instead.  I hear the Jacobins had something like it.”

It was half a joke, and the women laughed together before resuming their walk, to where the footmen and safe carriages waited for them.  But before they separated, they shook hands, nodded, agreed in soft voices to meet again at the next opportunity.

 

\--

  
In the coach, Joly nestled her head upon Lesgle’s shoulder.  The space was small, private, constricted after the evening walk in the Jardin des Plantes.  Private, and yet--she could feel the comforting rise and fall of her friend’s breath.  Courfeyrac’s laughter still rang in her ears; she wanted to consult Combeferre’s opinion of the magnetic experiments.  She could feel on her cheek the place where Enjolras had kissed her. 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know if the Jardin des Plantes gave free public lectures, but if they didn't they should have. In 1826 Deleuze wrote to the Académie de Médicine urging them to support studies of animal magnetism. It has the Joly stamp of approval.


End file.
